


the world is too much with us

by oceandeath



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Gen, Nonbinary Character, Yoglabs, but vaguely, everything is vague its the yogscast what do you want from me, nb honeydew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 18:01:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21712693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceandeath/pseuds/oceandeath
Summary: timeline-vague, yoglabs-adjacent, honeydew-centric. honeydew and lalna have a tea party once a week. this is one of them. honeydew has big feelings, lalna has jaffa cakes, xephos' work ethic is tearing this family apart. woo!
Relationships: ambigious relationships - Relationship, honeydew/lalna
Kudos: 9





	the world is too much with us

**Author's Note:**

> i have never posted my writing anywhere before but literally all i can think about these days is yoglabs and theres not enough honeydew content out there.  
> no warnings. ambiguous relationship feelings, but also it's honeydew/lalna because the world deserves honeydew/lalna content. also you can pry nb honeydew from my cold dead hands.   
> title is from a song by the same name by steve hauschildt

lalna tries to visit them at least once a week. when he doesn't, honeydew makes their way down to the labs to bang on his door and drag him back up to the un-subterranian levels. it's part of the conditions of this arrangement. they must meet in a room with at least one window. honeydew also tries to drag lalna outside when they can, but at the very least, getting him to see the sun is a net positive. frequently they end up in honeydew's office on the ground floor, tucked out of the way of the day-to-day bustle, with a view of the singular outside courtyard in the entire building. honeydew makes tea --"aren't you tired of all the damned coffee?"-- and serves whatever pastry they're feeling this week.

honeydew isn't stupid by any means. they know the precise melting point of all the common metals used around here, although not in a way with units attached. in a practical way. they can tell when the smeltery is hot enough to just begin melting iron and far too hot for tin. they can measure out the ratios needed for alloys with the kind of precision that lalna can only dream of. they've stopped lalna from making stupid mistakes more times than he can count, the scientist posed over the smeltery with a hunk of unprocessed copper and honeydew the only barrier between him and a huge vat of useless bronze. they're smart, and lalna likes to remind them of that fact in that rough way of his, knocking his shoulders against theirs when they're stuck in their head.

but xephos has a way of making them feel stupid. stumbling over the details, unable to articulate how exactly they know what they know, always fumbling behind, lost in xephos' shadow. it's not him, honeydew insists, you know how he gets. he gets stressed, he gets frazzled, and under pressure xephos' friendly demeanor dissolves into anger and fear-laced frustration. words said in heated moments never taken back or contradicted grind on their self esteem until there's not much left to speak of.

because he's not wrong. frequently, honeydew doesn't "get" it. they're lost in the face of the incredible improvements in science and technology and life and whatever else xephos' teams are doing down in their basement. the fact that they want to get it, sometimes even desperately so, is something lost on xephos. and that's fair, that's understandable. xephos is surely busy with all of that science. he doesn't have time to explain it all to honeydew- to dumb things down so even his bumbling dwarven friend can get it. he has better things to do.

but lalna doesn't. or at least, lalna insists he doesn't, and honeydew insists he needs to get out of the lab and see the sunlight, and unlike xephos, he doesn't wave them off with a "maybe later, friend," and the bitter taste of unfulfilled promises in their stomach. lalna seems genuinely apologetic about missing their weekly visit, and openly expresses his fondness for it. unlike xephos, he has no qualms with admitting that he should really get out more often. there's something about the way that he looks at honeydew and says "you're good for me," with that crinkle of a smile in his eyes that makes them feel both profoundly sad and inexplicably warm and fuzzy inside. it's what they wish they could hear from xephos.

lalna also has a way of explaining things that makes honeydew feel like they might actually have a brain rattling around in their big orange head. he talks about their projects in the labs with careless ease as he perches on honeydew's office chairs in increasingly less socially-acceptable ways, simplifying the science of the week into something even honeydew can understand. honeydew asked him about this once, if he was leaving out details to make it make sense the way xephos sometimes did, and lalna looked at them like they'd grown a third head.

"what d'you mean?" he'd asked.

"well, it's just that i know all the stuff you're doin' down there is real complicated, and xeph's always leaving stuff out on my account, on account of it's-- it's real hard to understand," they said, leaving the "for someone like me" unspoken and hovering in the air.

lalna plowed right through it, shaking his head. "s'not the stuff that's hard to understand," he said. "just-- the way people talk about it. lots of stuff's like that. laws, academic stuff, uh-- it's all written like, to make it hard for people to get it? i dunno. i know you're smart though, and if somebody takes the time to put it in a form you can understand, you pick it up quick as anything. s'not your fault the world's built on books and dusty academics." he punctuated this statement by putting his feet on honeydew's desk and munching another jaffa cake, as if he hadn't just turned honeydew's world upside down.

when the silence continued, he kept talking. "you're practical smart. applied smart. and you know what? all the theories in the world don't mean nothin' if you do nothin' with 'em. and you've got a good heart." he poked a finger at them accusingly. "you're gonna change the world, honeydew."

they kept thinking about it for hours afterwards, long after lalna had retreated into the white hallways and windowless rooms down below.

there was something about lalna that was loose and carefree even as he was a nervous wreck. there were a lot of things about lalna like that, conflicting traits on the surface blended somehow into one cohesive person. he would be oblivious to one thing and uncomfortably perceptive of another, seeing through one lie only to be fooled into the absurd. sometimes he seemed wholeheartedly good, sometimes despicably evil, and sometimes he was opening things up just to see why they ticked. he was confusing, and conflicting, and sometimes even contradictory, but he was always himself in a way that made it look like being himself was the easiest thing in the world.

honeydew envied that in him. they suspected that a lot of people envied that about lalna. they also suspected he was totally unaware that he had that effect. he made them want to be honeydew, whole and complete and their own separate entity outside of their connection to yoglabs and their history with xephos and really that was it, wasn't it? they were the ceo of yoglabs in naught but name at this point. they weren't doing what they wanted to do, they were just sitting back while xephos did xephos things down there in the sub-sub-sub basement and accepting their position as xephos' friend the bumbling idiot who sometimes makes a mess in the labs because they don't understand anything that's going on and they're not even sure why xephos still puts up with them if he doesn't ever want to do anything outside of letting them make a fool of themself in front of the people they're supposedly in charge of.

lalna made them feel like they could be more than that. not just with his words, but with the way he effortly was lalna in the exact opposite way that honeydew wasn't honeydew. when they lay awake at night in their too-big empty bed, they wanted to just reach out and grab him by the shoulders and demand that he explain how, how he was just so- so _him_. but they already knew what his response would be- a half-amused-half-scared "what?", the reflexive flash of a smile, and those bright green eyes wide with surprise, the gears behind them already starting to turn. and as fond of honeydew was of lalna, they didn't want to end up as one of his projects. the thought alone sent shivers of ice-blue fear through their veins.

they thought of his words, affirmations and reassurance offered freely with no strings attached, and even with the tangled gnarl of guilt curled away in their stomach, they burned some warmth back into their bones. "practical smart," he'd said. but what good was practical smart left theoretical? applied skills left unapplied? how much of the world could they change from their ground-floor corner office overlooking the one courtyard if they couldn't even get their closest friend to come aboveground for tea? if they couldn't even be honeydew right?


End file.
